by Henry James
James, like many of his contemporaries in London, was interested in doubles. His story “The Private Life,” published in 1892, mirrored the world of Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll. In it, James dramatized his own life in society and company and his own vocation as a solitary man, a writer. In the story he manages to place his writer in two places at exactly the same moment; he is both in company and alone at his desk. Now in early August 1906, James wrote to his agent, “I have an excellent little idea through not having slept a wink last night all for thinking of it, and must therefore at least get the advantage while the iron is hot.” In “The Jolly Corner,” written after his American sojourn of 1905, James found a new doubled self to dramatize, the man who had left New York and lived in England, and his double, still haunting him, who had never left, who still wandered in those same rooms which would fill James’s autobiography and had filled his novel “Washington Square.”
Brydon in the story has been thirty-three years away from New York. He shares James’s view of it. The city now seems to him reduced “to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures.” He sees his old friend Alice Staverton and muses on what a great man of business he might have become had he stayed in New York. He has kept his old house downtown empty all the years, having it cleaned and cared for every day. He now goes there to be haunted by a figure moving in its dark rooms, the figure who has never left them, just as James himself in part of his mind has never left them.
Both men then engage in a tussle throughout a long night, a battle to turn off the light in these rooms. “Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay.” Two fingers on his right hand which cover his face have been shot away. “The hands, as he looked, began to move, to open; then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered and presented. Horror, with the sight, had leaped into Brydon’s throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn’t utter.” “It is,” Leon Edel has written, “a profoundly autobiographical tale.” It is a reenactment of the battle which had taken place within James’s own self as he returned to New York and set out to describe the world he saw, seeking in his descriptions to destroy it, seeking to puncture its great power with the steel point of his great paragraphs. He wanted to restore life to the world that lingered within him, the old New York, which he had experienced before the complications of puberty and unsettlement, which he had left when he was twelve. It is significant that at the end of “The Jolly Corner,” Brydon, who has come unscathed through his dark night with his double, is rescued by his old friend called Alice—James’s sister and sister-in-law and the wife of his nephew were all called Alice. In the last sentence of “The Jolly Corner,” he draws her to his breast. His reward for turning off the light has been a hint of love, the possibility of an uncomplicated sexuality as enjoyed by his brother William. “The Jolly Corner” leaves its protagonist stranded between a presexual past and an implausible present.
Two of the last stories James wrote were also set in the New York he had explored and deplored for The American Scene. The city as viewed in both “Crapy Cornelia” and “A Round of Visits” is almost sinister, quite vulgar, and deeply unsettled. Theodora Bosanquet, James’s typist, to whom he dictated his fiction, noted on December 17, 1908: “Mr James going on with ‘short’ story for Harpers which extends mightily—& is, I think, dull.” Once more in “Crapy Cornelia” James is working with an idea of a returned exile, a man who dislikes the new city and remembers, with great nostalgia, the old. His protagonist notes the house of Mrs. Worthingham in which “every particular expensive object shriek[ed] at him in its artless pride.” He also makes what is James’s most eloquent attack on the lack of social cohesion in the city: “This was clearly going to be the music of the future—that if people were but rich enough and furnished enough and fed enough, exercised and sanitated and manicured ...all they had to do for civility was to take the amused ironic view of those who might be less initiated.” He railed against the lack of modesty in New Yorkers’ display of their advantages: “In his time...the best manners had been the best kindness, and the best kindness had mostly been some art of not insisting on one’s luxurious differences, of concealing rather, for common humanity, if not for common decency, a part at least of the intensity or the ferocity with which one might be ‘in the know.’”
The city in “A Round of Visits,” which was the last short story James wrote, is even more inhospitable than usual as Mark Monteith, another exile, returns to New York, where he has been swindled by a New Yorker. As in “A Most Extraordinary Case,” written forty years earlier, the protagonist is ill in a New York hotel. As in “An International Episode,” written thirty years earlier, the weather is impossible, this time “a blinding New York blizzard,” a “great white savage storm.” As in “Crapy Cornelia,” the hero goes to visit a number of old friends, deploring once more the interiors of their houses with their “rather glaringly false accents.” What is notable about these two stories is the deeply unsympathetic way in which the New York women are presented. Leon Edel has commented: “The women particularly in these tales are devoid of all sympathy, fat and fatuous, ugly, rich, cruel, they seem to have lost the meaning of kindness.” It is perhaps not surprising that the last moment of James’s last New York story involves a New Yorker blowing his brains out with a revolver.
“The Jolly Corner” was the single American tale that James allowed into his twenty-three-volume New York Edition, from which he excluded The Europeans, “Washington Square,” and The Bostonians. He worked on the edition in the years between writing The American Scene and writing his autobiography. In case there was any doubt that he meant business in his battle to make his personal New York stand up to the Goliath daily rising on the island of Manhattan, he wrote to his publishers, Scribners, on July 30, 1905: “If a name be wanted for the edition, for convenience and distinction, I should particularly like to call it the New York Edition if that may pass for a general title of sufficient dignity and distinctness. My feeling about the matter is that it refers the whole enterprise explicitly to my native city—to which I have had no great opportunity of rendering that sort of homage.” James’s work would show to a world, much hardened against the idea, that the reverse of the picture, the soft side as he would call it, could endure and matter, could have a fame beyond money. The great house of fiction would stand as tall as any skyscraper, its rooms would remain well lit even as the world outside darkened.
—Colm Tóibín
THE NEW YORK STORIES OF HENRY JAMES
THE STORY OF A MASTERPIECE
I
NO LONGER ago than last summer, during a six weeks’ stay at Newport, John Lennox became engaged to Miss Marian Everett of New York. Mr. Lennox was a widower, of large estate, and without children. He was thirty-five years old, of a sufficiently distinguished appearance, of excellent manners, of an unusual share of sound information, of irreproachable habits and of a temper which was understood to have suffered a trying and salutary probation during the short term of his wedded life. Miss Everett was, therefore, all things considered, believed to be making a very good match and to be having by no means the worst of the bargain.
And yet Miss Everett, too, was a very marriageable young lady—the pretty Miss Everett, as she was called, to distinguish her from certain plain cousins, with whom, owing to her having no mother and no sisters, she was constrained, for decency’s sake, to spend a great deal of her time—rather to her own satisfaction, it may be conjectured, than to that of these excellent young women.
Marian Everett was penniless, indeed; but she was richly endowed with all the gifts which make a woman charming. She was, without dispute, the most charming girl in the circle in which she lived and moved. Even certain of her elders, women of a larger experience, of a heavier calibre, as it were, and, thanks to their being married ladies, of greater freedom of action, were practically not so
charming as she. And yet, in her emulation of the social graces of these, her more fully licensed sisters, Miss Everett was quite guiltless of any aberration from the strict line of maidenly dignity. She professed an almost religious devotion to good taste, and she looked with horror upon the boisterous graces of many of her companions. Beside being the most entertaining girl in New York, she was, therefore, also the most irreproachable. Her beauty was, perhaps, contestable, but it was certainly uncontested. She was the least bit below middle height, and her person was marked by a great fulness and roundness of outline; and yet, in spite of this comely ponderosity, her movements were perfectly light and elastic. In complexion, she was a genuine blonde—a warm blonde; with a midsummer bloom upon her cheek, and the light of a midsummer sun wrought into her auburn hair. Her features were not cast upon a classical model, but their expression was in the highest degree pleasing. Her forehead was low and broad, her nose small, and her mouth—well, by the envious her mouth was called enormous. It is certain that it had an immense capacity for smiles, and that when she opened it to sing (which she did with infinite sweetness) it emitted a copious flood of sound. Her face was, perhaps, a trifle too circular, and her shoulders a trifle too high; but, as I say, the general effect left nothing to be desired. I might point out a dozen discords in the character of her face and figure, and yet utterly fail to invalidate the impression they produced. There is something essentially uncivil, and, indeed, unphilosophical, in the attempt to verify or to disprove a woman’s beauty in detail, and a man gets no more than he deserves when he finds that, in strictness, the aggregation of the different features fails to make up the total. Stand off, gentlemen, and let her make the addition. Beside her beauty, Miss Everett shone by her good nature and her lively perceptions. She neither made harsh speeches nor resented them; and, on the other hand, she keenly enjoyed intellectual cleverness, and even cultivated it. Her great merit was that she made no claims or pretensions. Just as there was nothing artificial in her beauty, so there was nothing pedantic in her acuteness and nothing sentimental in her amiability. The one was all freshness and the others all bonhomie.
John Lennox saw her, then loved her and offered her his hand. In accepting it Miss Everett acquired, in the world’s eye, the one advantage which she lacked—a complete stability and regularity of position. Her friends took no small satisfaction in contrasting her brilliant and comfortable future with her somewhat precarious past. Lennox, nevertheless, was congratulated on the right hand and on the left; but none too often for his faith. That of Miss Everett was not put to so severe a test, although she was frequently reminded by acquaintances of a moralizing turn that she had reason to be very thankful for Mr. Lennox’s choice. To these assurances Marian listened with a look of patient humility, which was extremely becoming. It was as if for his sake she could consent even to be bored.
Within a fortnight after their engagement had been made known, both parties returned to New York. Lennox lived in a house of his own, which he now busied himself with repairing and refurnishing; for the wedding had been fixed for the end of October. Miss Everett lived in lodgings with her father, a decayed old gentleman, who rubbed his idle hands from morning till night over the prospect of his daughter’s marriage.
John Lennox, habitually a man of numerous resources, fond of reading, fond of music, fond of society and not averse to politics, passed the first weeks of the Autumn in a restless, fidgety manner. When a man approaches middle age he finds it difficult to wear gracefully the distinction of being engaged. He finds it difficult to discharge with becoming alacrity the various petits soins incidental to the position. There was a certain pathetic gravity, to those who knew him well, in Lennox’s attentions. One-third of his time he spent in foraging in Broadway, whence he returned half-a-dozen times a week, laden with trinkets and gimcracks, which he always finished by thinking it puerile and brutal to offer his mistress. Another third he passed in Mrs. Everett’s drawing-room, during which period Marian was denied to visitors. The rest of the time he spent, as he told a friend, God knows how. This was stronger language than his friend expected to hear, for Lennox was neither a man of precipitate utterance, nor, in his friend’s belief, of a strongly passionate nature. But it was evident that he was very much in love; or at least very much off his balance.
“When I’m with her it’s all very well,” he pursued, “but when I’m away from her I feel as if I were thrust out of the ranks of the living.”
“Well, you must be patient,” said his friend; “you’re destined to live hard, yet.”
Lennox was silent, and his face remained rather more sombre than the other liked to see it.
“I hope there’s no particular difficulty,” the latter resumed; hoping to induce him to relieve himself of whatever weighed upon his consciousness.
“I’m afraid sometimes I—afraid sometimes she doesn’t really love me.”
“Well, a little doubt does no harm. It’s better than to be too sure of it, and to sink into fatuity. Only be sure you love her.”
“Yes,” said Lennox, solemnly, “that’s the great point.”
One morning, unable to fix his attention on books and papers, he bethought himself of an expedient for passing an hour.
He had made, at Newport, the acquaintance of a young artist named Gilbert, for whose talent and conversation he had conceived a strong relish. The painter, on leaving Newport, was to go to the Adirondacks, and to be back in New York on the first of October, after which time he begged his friend to come and see him.
It occurred to Lennox on the morning I speak of that Gilbert must already have returned to town, and would be looking for his visit. So he forthwith repaired to his studio.
Gilbert’s card was on the door, but, on entering the room, Lennox found it occupied by a stranger—a young man in painter’s garb, at work before a large panel. He learned from this gentleman that he was a temporary sharer of Mr. Gilbert’s studio, and that the latter had stepped out for a few moments. Lennox accordingly prepared to await his return. He entered into conversation with the young man, and, finding him very intelligent, as well as, apparently, a great friend of Gilbert, he looked at him with some interest. He was of something less than thirty, tall and robust, with a strong, joyous, sensitive face, and a thick auburn beard. Lennox was struck with his face, which seemed both to express a great deal of human sagacity and to indicate the essential temperament of a painter.
“A man with that face,” he said to himself, “does work at least worth looking at.”
He accordingly asked his companion if he might come and look at his picture. The latter readily assented, and Lennox placed himself before the canvas.
It bore a representation of a half-length female figure, in a costume and with an expression so ambiguous that Lennox remained uncertain whether it was a portrait or a work of fancy: a fair-haired young woman, clad in a rich mediæval dress, and looking like a countess of the Renaissance. Her figure was relieved against a sombre tapestry, her arms loosely folded, her head erect and her eyes on the spectator, toward whom she seemed to move—“Dans un flot de velours traînant ses petits pieds.”
As Lennox inspected her face it seemed to reveal a hidden likeness to a face he well knew—the face of Marian Everett. He was of course anxious to know whether the likeness was accidental or designed.
“I take this to be a portrait,” he said to the artist, “a portrait ‘in character.’”
“No,” said the latter, “it’s a mere composition: a little from here and a little from there. The picture has been hanging about me for the last two or three years, as a sort of receptacle of waste ideas. It has been the victim of innumerable theories and experiments. But it seems to have survived them all. I suppose it possesses a certain amount of vitality.”
“Do you call it anything?”
“I called it originally after something I’d read—Browning’s poem, ‘My Last Duchess.’ Do you know it?”
“Perfectly.”
“
I am ignorant of whether it’s an attempt to embody the poet’s impression of a portrait actually existing. But why should I care? This is simply an attempt to embody my own private impression of the poem, which has always had a strong hold on my fancy. I don’t know whether it agrees with your own impression and that of most readers. But I don’t insist upon the name. The possessor of the picture is free to baptize it afresh.”
The longer Lennox looked at the picture the more he liked it, and the deeper seemed to be the correspondence between the lady’s expression and that with which he had invested the heroine of Browning’s lines. The less accidental, too, seemed that element which Marian’s face and the face on the canvas possessed in common. He thought of the great poet’s noble lyric and of its exquisite significance, and of the physiognomy of the woman he loved having been chosen as the fittest exponent of that significance.
He turned away his head; his eyes filled with tears. “If I were possessor of the picture,” he said, finally, answering the artist’s last words, “I should feel tempted to call it by the name of a person of whom it very much reminds me.”
“Ah?” said Baxter; and then, after a pause—“a person in New York?”
It had happened, a week before, that, at her lover’s request, Miss Everett had gone in his company to a photographer’s and had been photographed in a dozen different attitudes. The proofs of these photographs had been sent home for Marian to choose from. She had made a choice of half a dozen—or rather Lennox had made it—and the latter had put them in his pocket, with the intention of stopping at the establishment and giving his orders. He now took out of his pocket-book and showed the painter one of the cards.
“I find a great resemblance,” said he, “between your Duchess and that young lady.”